The magician's son

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The Magician's Son: A serach for identity
By Sandy McCutcheon
Viking, $29.95

Sandy McCutcheon's autobiography has an emotional force that
keeps a grip on the reader's attention despite frequent bursts of
pomposity and ineptitude.

And, although McCutcheon, presenter and producer of the ABC
Radio National programs Australia Talks Back and
Australia Talks Books, has had a remarkably varied adult
life and career, the strength of this over-blown yet fascinating
exercise in self-examination lies in what happened in his
infancy.

"I grew up not believing who I was," McCutcheon announces early
in The Magician's Son. "When I write that I remember a
certain event happening before the age of nine, this is a memory I
have retrieved in recent years, or have been told by someone else,
not one that I've carried with me since the event's
occurrence."

Then, towards the book's end, describing a party attended by a
bunch of newly found relatives four years ago, he writes: "While it
was wonderful to meet them all, I found it difficult to be
surrounded by people who knew more about my background than I ever
could."

It was only 10 years ago, when he was 48, that he uncovered some
information about where he was born, who his natural parents were
and the circumstances that led to his adoption, at the age of two,
by a couple in Christchurch, New Zealand. They were Mac McCutcheon,
a gruff dentist, and his wife, Mary, who rarely spoke of her heroic
adventures as a nurse during World War II. The family's fourth
member was a girl who, McCutcheon discovered many years later, was
also adopted.

McCutcheon's first "distinct memory" was as a nine-year-old
being told by a schoolmate, Ian: "You're a little Nazi bastard."
Mac and Mary said the suggestion he was adopted was ridiculous, but
Ian's parents confirmed what their son had told him, though they
had no details of the adoption.

Whenever McCutcheon asked his mother about it she told him to
"stop all this silliness". Even when he was in his 40s she still
refused to give him any information - she claimed she was shielding
him from "the dreadful truth".

McCutcheon's life with his adoptive parents was physically
comfortable, but their secrecy and his own wild imaginings about
his origins - most persistently that he was the child of Holocaust
survivors or other people displaced by the war in Europe - made him
a disruptive, rebellious boy. As soon as he finished school he went
to England in an unsuccessful attempt to establish himself as an
actor.

The autobiography's early pages are well written and designed to
ensure that, once we have started reading, we will have to keep
going, to learn where McCutcheon's search for identity takes him
(an outcome that should not be revealed here). But after the
elegant opening, the quality of the book slumps. The story is
clogged with cliches, jargon, facetiousness, tautology and other
solecisms that should have had its editor demanding rewrites.

Here's a typical McCutcheon description: "His normal manner of
address was to spit out short sentences like rapid bursts from a
machine-gun." Of his decision to give up a job with an alpine
airline, he writes: "It seemed to me that my life expectancy would
be enhanced by a career on terra firma."

He also finds himself wrestling with inner demons, being less
than impressed by manicured gardens, driving through country that
he knows like the back of his hand, thankfully grabbing
opportunities and added bonuses with both hands, reacting in no
uncertain terms like a bull to a red rag and noting cold, hard
facts and examples of rapier-sharp wit.

The book is also padded with standard stuff about adolescent
turmoil; pointless or wordy tales from McCutcheon's travels, failed
marriages and de facto relationships; and banal, self-indulgent
lectures about Buddhism and Australia's move to the political
right.

Yet, through all the irrelevancies and stale prose, McCutcheon
does keep the main story moving by offering hints about where his
anguished search is taking him.

The amount of padding is in annoying contrast with his failure
to say much about his subsidiary career as the writer of umpteen
plays and six political thrillers. Some occasional and sketchy
references to them, especially the way his problems with memory and
identity have helped to shape plots, characters and settings, make
this reticence even more puzzling.